Hitting a century

Ventriloquists Ramdas and Satyajit Padhye on forwarding their family’s legacy and the popular 100-year-old puppet Mr Crazy.

Last year, he turned 100. Yet, he doesn’t look a day older. We are talking about Ardhavatrao aka Mr Crazy. This name will ring a bell for those who watched the popular TV show Meri Bhi Suno, which aired on Doordarshan in the 70s. It featured performances by ventriloquist Ramdas Padhye, along with his wife Aparna and Mr Crazy’s better half Avadabai. “He’s the only puppet in the world that has completed 100 years. And, I hope he completes many more years, if Satyajit carries on with the work. I’m really happy that people like this character all over the world,” shares Ramdas.

Ardhavatrao was the creation of Yeshwant Padhye, Ramdas’ father. Yeshwant, who was a magician, was intrigued by a ventriloquist’s performance in England and in order to add something new to his show, he started dabbling in ventriloquism in the late 1920s. However, since ventriloquial dummies were not available in India, he had to settle for self-made masks. After he bought the dummies from England, Ardhavatrao’s family — consisting of his wife and two sons — came into being.

Ramdas took over this family business after his father passed away in 1967. “At the age of six, all I wanted to do was talk to that puppet. I had no idea about the art. My father told me ‘if you want to talk to him you have to listen to me carefully’. That’s when he started teaching me the art of ventriloquism and puppetry. I learnt this art for 11 years,” says Ramdas.

After completing his mechanical engineering course and BSc in Mathematics, Ramdas started performing at clubs in the city during the 1970s. It was during one of these performances that someone spotted him and took down his contact details. Within a span of several months, Ramdas ended up getting a call from CBS, a popular TV network in the US, to perform for one of their shows. “I was the first Indian to be invited to perform on CBS in 1972. My journey started then,” he reminisces, before adding that since then they have performed almost 9,000 shows across the world.

For Satyajit, Ramdas’s son, his relationship with this art form started in seventh grade. “My school principal asked me to perform at this function. I asked my father and he agreed to teach me. He advised me to write my own character. I designed my character based on Pink Panther,” says Satyajit. Surprisingly, for him, the chief guests for that school function were his own parents.

For Ramdas, creating a character is always an exciting process. While discussing the hugely popular Lijjat Papad commercial featuring a puppet bunny, he shares, “It was born in 1979. The brief was to create a unique character and so I gave the bunny a peculiar laughter which was memorable for me,” For Satyajit, performing in front of legendary actor Amitabh Bachchan, who Ramdas had worked with in the past, is one of his favourite memories.

Recently, the family represented India at the Rainforest World Puppetry Carnival in Sarawak, Malaysia and at the 5th China Quanzhou International Puppetry Festival in China. In spite of these successes, do they think that the art form is in decline? “There is a misconception that only children can enjoy it. But that’s not true. Even adults can enjoy the art. What we do is a sophisticated form of puppetry. A number of people don’t know about that,” explains Ramdas. Before signing off, he adds, “In puppetry, you have to be everything — writer, music composer, editor and director.”